'Case Histories': Women in Trouble

CERTAIN characters are the stock in trade of detective novels: innocent female murder victims, embittered spinsters, wives with secrets, teenage runaways, sexy old actresses and men who feel driven to try, over and over, to protect or avenge the downtrodden. Kate Atkinson's latest novel contains all these characters, which might suggest it's just another variation on a host of well-worn themes -- but, amazingly enough, this cast, as familiar as it is, still has the power to ensnare us. In fact, "Case Histories" is so exuberant, so empathetic, that it makes most murder-mystery page-turners feel as lifeless as the corpses they're strewn with.

Atkinson's work has always spilled over with humorous types, humorous exchanges and humorous asides. Also colorful metaphors, class resentments, tragic deaths, cats and dogs, restless philandering and long-lasting family estrangements. Her first novel, "Behind the Scenes at the Museum," is a rich, billowy, war-torn, oddly bifurcating family saga, half of which takes place not in the text but in notes to the text. Her most recent novel, "Emotionally Weird," features a young woman on a romantic wind-swept island who tells us a story about a furiously scribbling creative writing class. Among its many elements -- way too many elements -- is a twist in which a private eye crashes from the novel-in-the-novel into the novel itself.

"Case Histories" is much tamer and much easier to follow. There is a real mystery framework, and after teasing and toying with the reader Atkinson delivers real solutions. The emotional lives of her characters are, however, never trimmed to fit. The novel is packed with women whose appetites are large, and Atkinson's prose is correspondingly loose and louche: no single point of view predominates, and everyone's thoughts effortlessly rollick along. Even the embittered spinster isn't exactly repressed about acknowledging her repressions.

Three case histories open the book: each presents a crime that suggests an escalating degree of female culpability. In the first, a 3-year-old disappears one summer night as she sleeps in a tent next to one of her older sisters. (Complete innocence.) In the next, a teenager is stabbed as she helps out in her widowed father's law office. (She's not a virgin, so possibly she brought it on herself? Was there a connection between her and her unknown assailant?) In the final crime, a husband is felled by an ax during an argument with his wife. (Complete guilt; inexplicable silence from the accused.) Of course, nothing is as it seems.

After these cases are presented, we are introduced to Jackson Brodie, a cop turned private investigator. It is many years after the crimes have been committed, and he seems to have no connection to any of them. Instead, we learn that Jackson has been hired by a jealous husband to follow his flight-attendant wife, whom he suspects of cheating on him. Although this subplot turns out to be a red herring, it eases us into Jackson's -- and Atkinson's -- eccentric style.

Sitting in his secondhand Alfa Romeo, waiting for the flight attendant to emerge from her house, Jackson broods about cars: the Volvo his ex-wife drives, the old BMW his daughter was conceived in, the BMW Z3 that belongs to the curvy dentist he fancies. Then the flight attendant shoots into view. Despite the tediousness of her life and despite the fact that she doesn't know she's being watched, she rockets off in what Jackson describes as her "girly" Ford Ka. In the weeks that he's been following her, Jackson has often been tempted to pull her over -- when he hasn't suddenly lost her.

It's a good blueprint for the rest of the book. Eventually, Jackson is consulted about the three old crimes, and as he ricochets among the concerns of his new clients he finds himself hanging on for dear life, not so much a professional investigator as a man barely keeping up with events. But he does, and with such irritable gusto that we come to love him for it.

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The women in "Case Histories" all seem to want to get into trouble -- not because they're self-defeating, because they're living at top speed. They're hungry, generous, robust and impetuous. Consider, for example, the wife with a secret: one minute she's looking at some strawberry jam at a country fair and the next she's amorously bent over an old wooden drainboard with a local landowner, who happens to be a complete stranger.

Too often in mystery novels, the detective moans about how he must protect the weak and vulnerable -- the female. In Atkinson's all-embracing book, Jackson feels more than sympathy for the many women around him; he identifies with them in an offhand and therefore convincing way. Reacting to the taunts of an old army buddy ("You're such a policeman, Jackson"), he mildly observes: "Yeah, I know. I'm a policeman, I've turned into a woman . . . and I carry an organ-donor card. It's called middle age."

Despite the magic realist aspects of Atkinson's previous work, her talents -- especially her knack for spinning tales within tales -- are particularly well suited to the detective form. And

in "Case Histories," she's clearly not chafing at the discipline imposed by this structure. In fact, it serves to keep in check what in her other books could seem an excessive self-consciousness. You can start this one knowing that it will have a mystery's satisfying shape -- and also knowing that none of Atkinson's dramatic range will be sacrificed to it.

Although solutions and surprises abound, in "Case Histories" Atkinson is less interested in detailing the steps of an investigation than in exploring the rough and tumble that happens along the way. Her humor -- and she is a very funny writer -- is the sort that comes from being able to see the way happiness and sadness can emerge from the same situation. Her reach is certainly long enough to touch cruelty and grief, but it also extends far in the opposite direction -- all the way to joy.